William J. Spurlin

resisting heteronormativity/resisting recolonisation: affective bonds between indigenous women in southern Africa and the difference(s) of postcolonial feminist history

This article recognises that any attempt to theorise the first wave globally must specify the use of the term ‘global’, so as not to elide the specificity of local differences, and must critically account for how feminist struggles among postcolonial, indigenous women are intertwined with a resistance to a history of colonialism and racial domination. While more than a demand for equal access to the symbolic order on the basis of gender alone, Western feminists must study carefully the cultural and gender implications of work by indigenous women in postcolonial contexts which do not easily fit into familiar theoretical paradigms that mimic the development of Western feminism, given the heterosexist biases of Western feminism historically. To what extent does the very form of historicisation of feminist struggles in the West repeat the colonising gesture when attempting to historicise the struggles of women in postcolonial contexts where the three waves of feminism as an organising framework, however loosely constructed, are transplanted to locations where they did not emerge historically? Through an examination of feminist work coming out of southern Africa, the article argues how attention to affective and erotic bonds between women in Lesotho provides a critical response to the heterosexist biases of African cultural nationalism, as well as to the colonising tendencies of feminist and queer enquiry in the West that do not account for the primacy of the performativity of sexual expression rather than its discursive naming as a precise sexual identity. The article concludes by asking for a reconceptualisation of the temporality of feminism not limited to its periodisation in the West, but informed by the specificities of feminist struggles locally and globally, including erotic autonomy as a viable praxis of decolonisation and a heightened self-reflexivity about the imperialist gestures guiding the production of (feminist) history and scholarship.

Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/The Cultural Politics of Biomedicine

This article works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, especially queer theory, to examine critically the controversial, and often socially controlling, role of biomedical knowledge and interventions in the realm of human sexuality. It will attempt to situate scientific/medical discourses on sexuality historically, socially, and culturally in order to expose the ways in which “proper” sexual health in medical research and clinical practice has been conflated with prevailing social norms at particular historical junctures in the 20th and 21st centuries. How might the relationship between clinical and cultural spheres be better engaged in biomedical knowledge and clinical practice in understanding sexual health, given the impact of homophobic and transphobic assumptions in the diagnostic histories of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood, a new diagnostic category introduced into the DSM following the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-III? The article will argue further that biomedical knowledge is always already mediated through culture by analyzing normative racial, gender, class, and sexual ideologies that regulated early understandings of the epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the West and in the postcolonial world while informing global health policy on HIV/AIDS. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical education for both LGBTQI patients and medical professionals, for understanding gender and sexual rights as human rights, and for thinking about new kinds of interventions, contestations, and struggles to resist continued homophobic and transphobic assumptions in biomedical practice today and their ongoing effects in the everyday world.

Introduction: Comparing Queerly, Queering Comparison

What does it mean to compare? The answer to this question is often taken for granted: highlighting both similarities and differences between what is being compared. The comparative essay is one of the most common of undergraduate writing exercises, but when one notices how frequently students use arguments that go something like “A and B are both alike and different,” one realizes that the key question is not what is a comparison but when is a comparison worth making. How many teachers have found themselves pointing out to students that, of course, A and B are both alike and different; if they were not different at all, B would be A. If they did not have anything in common, what would be the point of comparing them? A strong comparative argument thus needs to be more specific than simply stating that A and B are both alike and different; it also needs to assert how they are alike and different and why these similarities and differences are relevant. The heart of comparison, one could then say, lies somewhere between almost totally different but not quite and almost the same but not quite; analyzing what exactly lies in this in-between could be said to be the work of comparison and comparative studies. Yet while one might think comparison is essential to comparative studies, at least one well-known comparatist has argued otherwise.

Epprecht Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xiii + 231 pp. Bibliography. Index.

communities to build new homes as sojourners may not create detachment from the original home, as Okeke-Ihejirika contends. People can embrace multiple homes. Indeed, it seems more tenable that there is great variety in the meanings and experiences of home. For example, Canadian Africans may re-create home there even as they long for, travel to, communicate with, and maintain linkages with the old country and other places where they may have lived. The linkages diey maintain continue to resonate because of people left behind, memories, spiritual connections, and material investments. Past studies of the diaspora show that these nostalgic thoughts of home continue, even though people have left or even fled under onerous circumstances. If Ihejirika-Okeke believes that African women in Canada are different, she should rigorously demonstrate this through careful sampling.

19.95. Paper.

This book has argued has that the study of (homo)sexuality in South Africa needs to be bracketed contextually under a set of historical, cultural, and ideological conditions, but any study that falls under the rubric of the social effects of apartheid and its aftermath in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy remains incomplete if it confines itself only within South African national borders. While the primary focus of this study is the examination of the politics of sexual difference as they have “come out” of postapartheid politics in South Africa, the effects of sexual struggles in South Africa have been examined in other parts of the region, as examples, where appropriate, to show how multiple lines of social invention, domination, and resistance have been activated within national borders as well as across them.1 While certainly the varied histories and social struggles to discern new South African nationhood and sense of belonging are multiple and contradictory, they are useful in understanding the ways in which sexual difference is inscribed into (or sometimes erased out of) the national imaginary.

Sexual/cultural hybridity in the new South Africa: emergent sites of transnational queer politics

Postcolonial studies, in its analysis of marginalization and subaltern domination, has tended to focus on national identities and borders and the ways in which race, gender, and class are configured within the hegemonic space of the nation, but, until very recently, has neglected seriously the ways in which hetero-sexism and homophobia shape imperial, nationalist, and global power. The elisions that this historical focus on the nation-state entails are not remarkably different from those elisions of sexuality that prevailed before the rise and influence of queer theory.1 Keeping in mind Gayatri Spivak’s claim that the idea or sheer possibility of the so-called native informant is always already inscribed in the academy as evidence in the production of disciplinary knowledge on the culture of others (Postcolonial Reason 66–67), the elision of which I speak may also be symptomatic of the historical tendency of postcolonial studies to assign a more or less static (hetero-)sexuality to the Other. As disciplinary European knowledge, which circumscribes postcolonial studies in the West, has not adequately engaged the politics of sexual difference, queer inquiry has begun to form a site of contestation, of rupture, to the extent that postcolonial studies often reinvents the sex and gender codes of the West that privilege not only heteronormative social relations, but also a matrix of other normative ideologies pertaining to the body, family and kinship relations, race, national identity, health care, and other social positions, categories, and institutions.

Broadening Postcolonial Studies, Decolonizing Queer Studies: Disciplinary Transitions and Social Change in the “New” South Africa

In the search for the origins of exploitation and oppression, especially in trying to understand apartheid in South Africa through the perspective of postapartheid politics, contemporary historiography in South Africa, along with postcolonial studies on South Africa largely produced in the West, for the most part, have located same-sex desire within the normalizing structures of heteronormativity, reading it as a temporary aberration brought about by a regime of racial domination and the concomitant harshness of exploitative labor conditions. That is, while the critical attention of historians to colonialism, capitalism, and racism as intersecting and interrelated systems of power has helped to write the black working class into history, focusing on the lived experiences of black working people and their exploitation by the developing market economy (Harries xv), historical work on same-sex bonds among indigenous Africans in southern Africa seems to have been overwritten by the politics of racial and class oppression without sufficiently challenging heteronormativity as a self-evident given.1

Reclaiming Insurgent Sexualities: Migrant Labor and Same-Sex Marriages on the South African Gold Mines

In the previous chapter, I acknowledged how the dominant body of historical research on same-sex relations among indigenous miners, within the system of South African migrant labor, is able to mark the ways in which the relationships are constructed differently from articulated and enacted desires between men in the West. I argued that the marriages between African men who worked on the South African gold mines need to be historically bracketed and not simply “recovered from history” through an analysis of such interrelated systems of domination as racism, capitalism under apartheid, and migrant labor. Yet, while the two major studies on the mine marriages (Moodie and Harries) accomplish this, the axis of desire remains overridden by other systems of domination, and the marriages themselves seem too facilely reinscribed into hetero-normative social relations without sufficiently analyzing them as a new space of desire that potentially subverts heterosexual hegemony. On the other hand, while queer studies may provide a useful analytic tool to address this significant gap, it cannot go so far as to produce “postcolonial queer” as a new category, since this would set up a problematic self/other split between the developed and developing world, that is, in this case, between the West and Africa.

Affective Bonds between Women in Lesotho: Retheorizing Gender, Sexuality, and Lesbian Existence

In refusing to (re)produce South Africa as the spectacle of apartheid while being attentive to the historical reality of racial domination and its material effects in an analysis of struggles pertaining to the politics of sexual difference, this book has attempted to engage the useful, but sometimes slippery, cultural and epistemological significations that come about in the engagement of postcolonial/queer as a theoretical mode of inquiry when studying South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. Because the transition is still ongoing, this has necessitated a contextual analysis of the politics of sexuality within the wider struggle for democratization and the effects of that struggle within the frame of the nation-state, in other parts of the region, and in the larger global sphere. At the same time, this study has not confined itself to the present postapartheid situation alone, but has also examined and critiqued the ways in which earlier historiographic and anthropological studies of nonheteronormative indigenous sexualities in the region have superbly accounted for their historical and cultural difference; yet these studies still fall somewhat short of a more comprehensive analysis of sexual agency and erotic autonomy to the extent that indigenous same-sex bonds are framed and interpreted through a trace of heteronormative assumptions.

Transforming Theory/Transforming Borders: Postcolonial Queer Inquiry and/as a Politics of Decolonization

Amidst the political shift from apartheid to democracy for over a decade in South Africa, the country has been engaged in political and discursive struggle in attempting to redefine the signifier “South Africa” that acknowledges the atrocities of apartheid violence while simultaneously attempting to rebuild an historically divided society through developing and implementing more democratic structures of governance. Part of this national struggle is not to erase the apartheid era from South African national consciousness and memory, but to rebuild the nation, not only under the traditional tropes of economic development and modernization usually imposed on Africa and other parts of the world by the West, but through juridical practices that take into account the fullest possible range of human rights for all South African citizens, perhaps best symbolized in the early years of the postapartheid period by the establishment and work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.1